There are many circumstances in which an activity would benefit from robotic assistance. A robot could usefully assist a human in many tasks, such as household activities, industrial activities, and the like. However, using conventional approaches it is difficult for a robot to identify how it might help. One approach might be for the human to give detailed instructions, the robot responding dutifully to each instruction. However this puts a heavy burden on the human, and it would be better if the robot itself could take a more thoughtful approach to assisting the human. However, interpretation of human actions and gestures is a complex problem.
Action selection for a robot is discussed in G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal, “Cost-Based Anticipatory Action Selection for Human-Robot Fluency”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Vol. 23, No. 5, 2007.
Robotic assistance would be considerably facilitated by new approaches in which a robot could attempt to predict task requirements.